19:51
by Beanzbarr
Summary: Things aren't always as the party portrays them. Emmanuel Goldstein's point of view of the party and the brotherhood.


It all started with the books. The hunting down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. And even if a book had survived the smoldering destruction that its shelf-mates inevitably met, it was no longer the same book. Everything had been altered to fit the ideologies of the party. Characters, endings, authors, sometimes even whole plots had been changed to conform to their ideas. The only original piece left of an old book, if anything, was usually the title. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to the books, but to newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, photographs – to every kind of literature or documentation which might hold any political or ideological significance. Eventually the whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they'll exist only in newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradicting of what they used to be. Everything will fade into mist. The past will be erased, the erasure forgotten, and the lies will all become truth. _This is exactly why it is important to remember_ Goldstein thought as he sat in his chair. He glanced at the time on the telescreen 19:51, nine minutes until the two minutes hate. He drifted lazily back into his thoughts. Someone had to be there to remember the past, or there would be no future, or at best a very dismal one. History is always found in literature, whether it be fiction or non, it always contributes something about the time period from which it originated. Destroying it is to destroy our race's connection with its past. Goldstein remembered back to the beginning, in the brotherhood's earliest stages, when a friend had once compared the human race to a Phoenix:

"Every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. Every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them."

Without any memory of the past, human race becomes the Phoenix. Burning himself up and never knowing why. Since those days, things had only gotten worse. All over the world the government had been destroying literature, not only in America, where Goldstein had originally been from. Goldstein had spent much of his young adulthood learning and committing to memory as much literature as he could, mostly from others who had committed books to memory, but occasionally from a book itself. He traveled the world soaking in as much literature as possible, finally ending up in the birthplace of William Shakespeare himself, in hopes of learning some of the man's great works. While in Stratford, a war had developed – they never really started or ended anymore, only changed location – that had turned what was once Britain and the Americas into one large unified country called Oceania, where Goldstein became trapped, but not before he became a walking library of Alexandria. His repertoire included many works of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Machiavelli, Thoreau, Twain, Shakespeare, Wells, and of course the book of Ecclesiastes.

Goldstein reflected on the development of the brotherhood in Oceania and how much it had stayed the same over the years, doing nothing but collecting members. Most of the brotherhood didn't even know if he still existed, or if he had ever existed and was used only as mere hate propaganda. The name brotherhood itself was propaganda made by the party to convince its citizens of the 'evil' the organization represented, when in fact the brotherhood was never even planned, but consisted only of men that each had a book that he wanted to remember, and did. Slowly, these men met each other through travel, got a loose network together, and traded knowledge. In fact Goldstein himself was just one of these men who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was not the commander of a vast shadowy army, as the party portrayed him, he was just another insignificant member. The whole purpose of the brotherhood was never to actively overthrow the government, as the party claimed, the purpose of the brotherhood was to be dust jackets for books, to commit to memory mankind's past so that one day when the wars were over, perhaps their knowledge would be of some use to the world.

About a decade prior, he remembered, the amount of people who craved literature had grown exponentially since the days when all the books were burned. Those who remembered the books, the men like Goldstein, became widely known and popular enough to develop a following. The party, of course, feared that if the citizens were to learn of a better quality of life that existed before the present, they would rebel. In order to appease them, the party invented novel-writing machines that wrote books, but this way it was controlled. The only books that were out there were books that agreed with the ideologies of the party, and if ideology changed, then so did the book. It was at this time that Goldstein was caught and put in a labor camp for five years for 'leading the conspiracy' ever since then he was used as the party's example of someone evil that everyone should hate. Goldstein wondered if the wars would ever end. He wondered if he would ever be able to spread the knowledge that he had trapped within his mind. Even though he sometimes doubted everything he lived for and believed in, he knew that he would never get so discouraged as to give up having hope in the future because he knew very well that the knowledge that he possessed would be important; if not in his lifetime, then in his successor's.

Goldstein's thoughts were cut short as the telescreen announced that it was time for today's two minutes hate. He got up and joined in as was expected of a party member. He screamed obscenities at the images of the soldiers in Eurasia, he yelled at thought criminals, and when that old photograph of him from when he was arrested appeared on the screen just as it had yesterday and every day prior, he fought the urge to resist yelling hateful things at it. It was himself after all, even if he no longer looked the same. He forced himself to remember that he was not really the man in the picture. The picture was of a man named Goldstein, and he was not really Goldstein. He was Austen and Brontë and Dickens, Ecclesiastes and Machiavelli, Thoreau, Twain, Shakespeare, and Wells. But most of all, he was a man formerly named Guy Montag, and nobody could take that from him. Not even the party, for whatever knowledge was in the few centimeters within his skull was his, and his alone.


End file.
